How do you measure if your Configure/Price Quote (CPQ) initiative was a success? One obvious option is to track if the CPQ tool helps you achieve the basic CPQ benefits (increased revenue, increased margins, eliminate quote/opportunity/contract errors and close more deals).

Basic CPQ Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s)

In addition to the KPI’s above I suggest that you also look at this data

1. Customer Facing activities and
2. Non-Customer Facing activities. These can be further divided into
   • Sales Related activities and
   • Non Sales related activities OR Internal activities

Depending on the size of your company, you might want to further differentiate these activities between sales regions (e.g. Americas, Europe/Middle East/Africa, Asia).

Before we look at the additional KPI’s let’s clarify the terms introduced above:

Customer Facing activity from a CPQ point of view  (Note: This is focused on CPQ and does not include activities like e.g. Customer related travel, relationship building, networking, lead identification etc.)

• Sales Meetings (e.g. Product Demo’s)

NON Customer Facing activities from a CPQ point of view

•  Sales Related activities
  • Sales Meeting preparation
  • Product / Solution research
  • Customer / Competitor / Industry research
  • Product Configuration
  • Quote and Proposal setup
  • Determine special pricing requirements
  • Get all required Deal approvals

• Non Sales related OR Internal activities
  • Internal Meetings
  • Training/Learning
  • emails
  • Administrative activities

Note that this Blog Post looks at one possible option to measure the CPQ success of a company’s internal Sales Team. This Blog Post does NOT look at ways to measure the CPQ success for Channel Partners or End Customers.